DESCRIPTION (Investigator's Abstract): Natural language presents a wide range of comprehension problems that any language understanding system must confront. The successful comprehension of language requires that a number of different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information be processed and interpreted. Current psycholinguistic models focus almost exclusively upon a single source of linguistic information, either syntactic or semantic. The proposed research will examine two additional sources of information that might potentially be exploited: the prosodic features of spoken language and the statistical regularities with which words co-occur in a single sentence. The first aim of the research is theoretical: empirical investigations of the effects of prosodic and statistical variables on human sentence comprehension will provide constraints on models of language understanding. The second aim is practical: for people with auditory deficits or speech problems, the results of the planned research will provide information critical both to the design of remedial training methods, and to improved speech-to-text translation systems and text-to-speech production systems.